Commonwealth Bank has moved the goalposts for contactless payments.The bank announced yesterday that it had partnered with MasterCard to rollout a new Tap and Pay application aimed at customers who have a near field communication enabled smartphones running Android version 4.4 and above.Customers with these phones who download the latest version of the app will no longer have to buy a PayTag sticker to make contactless payments. In the past, only a couple of models of Android phones could be used to make contactless payments without the sticker.However, while the sticker may be gone, users will have to type their PIN on the phone app for every payment they make - not just for those above $100 - which injects a significant level of friction into the payment process.The app makes use of host card emulation which is available in newer Android operating systems, allowing physical payment cards to be emulated in software rather than on the secure element of an NFC chip, PayTag or SIM card. It also harnesses MasterCard's cloud based tokenisation service which improves security by replacing the 16 digit debit card number with a unique 16 digit token that cannot be transferred.To make a payment, users are required to launch the app on their phone, see their payments data and the balance on the screen, input a PIN, and then wave the phone over a contactless payments terminal to complete the transaction. Funds are debited to their MasterCard account.Commbank is the first major local bank to offer the HCE contactless payment service, although Westpac is probably not far behind, having used its now-traditional test bed, Westpac New Zealand, to pilot HCE since mid-2014. Cuscal and CUA made use of Android's HCE capability in the Redi2PAY app, launched last year. Lisa Frazier, executive general manager for digital channels at CBA, said demand for mobile banking had surged, and over the course of the last year it had grown its user base from 1.76 million to 3.2 million users who had used the platform to complete over A$1 billion worth of transactions.In terms of mobile payments - using the smartphone as a digital wallet - the results were more modest with 60,000 mobile payments being made each week, worth $1.25 million, she said.The number of transactions made overall using mobile banking had soared 142 per cent, with 4.7 million transactions taking place per week, with a record three million single day peak being set on December 23 last year.In the last week of February the bank passed another milestone when more people signed into online banking from mobile devices than PCs.Frazier said that CBA had also experienced strong demand for cardless cash with 370,000 transactions to date, and that the bank's app had been used 90,000 times to temporarily lock access to a card since the feature was launched last October.